Digging to Freedom

Image

CreditFrom "Wall"

By Maria Russo

Nov. 5, 2014

The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall would hardly seem the occasion for an entrancing picture book, but the British author-illustrator Tom Clohosy Cole’s “Wall” is just that. The narrator is a little boy stuck in East Berlin with his mother and sister, while his father has ended up in the West. Out of this wrenching scenario Cole has fashioned a tight little narrative that has all the ambient foreboding of a fairy tale, the sense of children at the mercy of enormous, irrational, half-understood forces. But with a morose, shadowy palette of midnight blues and browns and a flat, elongated look that calls to mind Cold War poster art, it’s clear that the evil lurking is a distinctly modern one: jackboots and rifles, not malevolent spells, but what’s the difference to a child whose parent has been taken away?

The book’s first spread shows the wall in all its menacing, repressive glory: A guard tower is shrouded in darkness to the east, while to the west the sunset sky reveals throngs of agitated people congregating, many pointing up to the guards. On the left, darker side of the page we see the book’s opening words: “My mom said that while the wall was being made, . . .”; to the right, the sentence continues: “. . . our dad got stuck on the other side.” It’s a wonderful in medias res opening — for this child “the wall” exists without explanation, just as the sun or the mountains do. It cleaves the page just as it has divided his city and his family.

“I worried he was lonely, but Mom said life was better over there,” the story continues. So our narrator begins trying to imagine a way to get to the other side of the wall. He knows that some people in East Berlin do try to escape: We see an image of the boy looking out his window as two hopefuls shimmy across a tightrope, followed by another of a soldier seen from behind, holding a limp body, with fields of razor wire in the background. The image is just otherworldly enough to be disturbing rather than grisly — the way he’s carrying the gracefully draping body almost evokes Sleeping Beauty.

Eventually the boy starts digging a hole in a field. He works until it goes all the way under the wall. One night the family slips out and goes to it, ready to escape in a decidedly old-fashioned way. They are stopped by a “thunderous voice” calling “HALT!” But a happy surprise follows: The soldier declares that “nothing should come between a father and his family,” and on the next page we see the family watching the sunrise in West Berlin from the edge of the woods. When they reach the father’s apartment, Cole gives the story one last spin, as the father is himself at work digging a hole right through the floor, with dirt smudges on his face. The exhausted arrivals are bathed in a beatific light, but behind them you can still just glimpse the field of razor wire, looking like a surreal roller coaster. It’s an ending with just the right dose of fairy tale. Maybe in real-life East Berlin, just explaining your situation to the nice soldier didn’t do the trick. But the wall did come down.